The best Coop experience for years.

Tom Clancey’s Splinter Cell: Conviction recently hit the shelves, and let me tell you, I was excited. I have loved the series since playing its very first installment on the PC years ago and although dubious at first, I have come to love the new directions they are taking the games in.

The previous game was Double Agent, where much of the game became about the player’s choices and operating on both sides of the law. It brought some good things to the series, though the daylight levels were an absolute pain and I’m glad to see they have been dropped in Conviction.

For me, Splinter Cell has been an ever evolving series. Slowly, at first, with simple gameplay tweaks and graphical improvements, new gadgets and more open level design as the series went on. Double Agent mixed things up a bit but when I saw a very early teaser for Conviction, I was sceptical about the radical change in gameplay. I feared that Ubisoft were going to make it more “run and gun” than the patient, tense stealth game it had been.

Admittedly, they kind of have. If you got spotted in the previous SC’s you were pretty screwed, your only chance was to dodge back into the shadows, hide and pray that the guy with the flashlight didn’t poke his head around the wrong corner. Now, you can crack out the guns, grab a hostage and blast your way out if needs be, but the feel of the original series is still there, for which I’m thankful.

These two polar opposites of gameplay usually suck in a game, stealth and full on shooter rarely mix well. However I think Ubisoft have come about as close as anyone ever has of bringing these two elements together perfectly. Both feel pretty good and work well. You still have to be damn careful in a firefight, get too ambitious and the enemy will drop you faster than a christmas kitten into a canal. But if your back is against the wall, there’s always the opportunity to go Leroy Jenkins and get out of a bad situation.

This brings me to the cooperative play. In previous games, the coop was usually tagged on, had a few little gimmick objectives and was never anything great. It added a little extra play time, but wasn’t what you bought the game for. I was very curious about the coop campaign of Conviction, as it seemed they had genuinely gone for gold this time. However, lacking any friends that play the series on Xbox Live, I had avoided the coop in fear of getting some unknown asshole screwing up my stealthing.

However, I tried it out. I hooked up a randomer, let the opening cutscene roll and got stuck in. At first all was well, but soon enough Mr Unknown started just charging into every situation guns a’blazin. What struck me however, was just how awesome it was to have him do this. I was creeping along, scaling balconies, slipping through airvents and silently dispatching the enemy, whilst he was kicking down doors, using fully automatic weapons, flashbangs and not really giving a shit about stealth at all. But it WORKS. Surprised? I was. Very, very surprised.

Whilst Randomer was tying up the enemies in firefights, I was using EMP gadgets and sonar goggles to mark targets and stun enemies for him. I was using the execution moves on anybody thay tried to flank him and whilst he pinned them down with full auto, I would slip out of the shadows and send them to hell.

I am genuinely stunned at how fun utilising the two different methods of gameplay to such extremes is, and at how well it goes together. One doesn’t really effect the other if you don’t want it to. I would love to play through on full stealth mode, after all, thats what Splinter Cell has always done best. But having a stranger go apeshit with an AK-47 whilst I take care of the sneaky shit is fine by me.

All in all, Splinter Cell: Conviction is the most fun I’ve had on an Xbox Coop game with a stranger, ever. A damn fun experience that I would recommend to anyone in a heartbeat and, as such, will now renew my efforts of pestering someone I actually know to buy the game because I am certain that if its this fun with a 360 random, it will be ten times as fun with a friend.

Bad Company 2: What have they done to you?

Alright, I’ll start off by saying this: I have been a big, BIG fan of the Battlefield games ever since Battlefield: 1942 made its PC debut way back when. I love the format, its always been simplistic, yet complicated at the same time. There is a great many ways to play the game, switching classes, vehicles, tactics or you can just pick up the nearest M1 Garande or M16 and charge your ass in.

Battlefield: Bad Company has been probably my favorite multiplayer game on the Xbox 360 to date, I’ve had it since it came out and it rarely sits around gathering dust. The single player blew me away when I first purchased it, but when I took it online it reaches a whole new league. Its just fantastic. The graphics are beautiful, the varied gameplay experience was brilliant even though some things were slightly unbalanced in the multiplayer (the helicopter, for example) most of the time it was great fun. Plus the sound effects were just epic, the best of any shooter I have played. The music is dramatic, the voice acting is well played and the sounds of war add a real atmosphere with giant explosions, the far off crack of a sniper rifle and the pang of bullets as they rain down at your feet. Or into your head, either way.

So with all that in mind, imagine my excitement when tonight I got my grubby little paws on the Bad Company 2 demo and gave it a go. And guess what, its not as good. Not at all. Some of these things might be ironed out in the final game so this is based purely on the demo experience.

The very first thing I notice is the controls and the fact that I do not like them. They’re not bad, just highly unintuitive. In all the BF games on the 360, Y has been the button for using your knife. Not anymore, now that brings out a pistol. Fair enough, so where is my knife? Oh its on the button that should change my weapon but doesn’t. Great. So I have to use the fucking D-Pad to change my weapons? Meaning I have to move my left thumb away from the stick that keeps me moving (and in turn keeps me from getting riddled with bullets) to switch to my grenade launcher? Great again. Not only that, but on the weapon select window that pops up, it doesn’t tell you how to get back to your fucking gun. GREAT. I pressed left to select my grenade launcher, so I should press right to get back to the rifle, right? NOPE! That makes me throw an ammo box at my enemy.

In a Battlefield game the multiplayer is often hectic, with enemies on all sides and you have a split second to do what you need to do to survive. Having to fuck about with controls that make no sense is not fun. Plus the turning in it feels slow and heavy, like you are playing a fat guy.

My second gripe is, why is there no health bar? Or if there is, where the fuck is it? I DONT WANT A RED SCREEN TO INDICATE MY IMINENT DEATH THANKYOU. I want a fucking health bar. Just because Modern Warfare does it does not mean its a good thing. There are med kits, and your team can see your health, yet alas, I cannot. Why? It comes down to the one reason behind the faults of this game. Modern Warfare 2.

It has been pretty much admitted that this game is being put out there to compete with MW2 and lets face it, we’re not fucking stupid, we know this. The thing is, why couldn’t they compete by releasing a game that feels different to MW2? This feels exactly the same to play in my opinion. Seriously, alot of Bad Company 2 feels like Modern Warfare with vehicles. Something about the way the character moves, the idiotic and sudden jerking of the camera when anything at all happens within 50000000 miles of your location. Even the death cam is damn near identical to MW2.

For those of you who may not have guessed, I did not enjoy the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer all that much. I found it boring, the perks system was just annoying and it simply, outright did not grab me. Its a great game, I don’t deny that at all, but I just dont find it that entertaining. So why the fuck is Battlefield trying so hard to be it, when Battlefield is an outstanding format in itself? Its a classic, it has fans dating back years and years before MW2 was even a blip in its daddy’s radar.

Right, here’s the shocker though. I’m going to buy Bad Company 2, and I will play it and more than likely I will enjoy it. Judging by the demo it will be a great game. The sound is great, the level destruction has only gotten better and the more balanced classes equal it out nicely. But it lacks that pedigree that the first Bad Company had. Even with all its new bells and whistles, its new campaign game, the first Bad Company FELT like a Battlefield, through and through. It was the prodigal son. This is the slightly nerdy cousin who plays too much Modern Warfare 2 and thinks thats all the world has to offer.

I genuinely hope I am eating these words come release date. I really do hope that someone can look at me and go “Ha! I told you so! Its just as good as the first one!” but I’m not holding my breath. Im just glad I got it on pre-order for £25.

Reverend Rover.

Magic

Last year I decided to go ahead and take up a new hobby, something that wasn’t staring at a screen or drinking tea. I decided to learn the guitar. This is all well and good, a great skill to have and I would thoroughly recomend it to anyone. However, when you are looking to show yourself off to a pretty girl, its hard to play the guitar card, because you have to get them within earshot of the damn thing in the first place and lets face it, if they are at your house, you are probably getting laid anyway, so fuck the guitar. So I started looking for a skill that I could learn that could easily be carried around, or is at least a good talking point. What did I settle for this year? Well, one glorious word, MAGIC.

Let me tell you straight away. If you enjoy spending your free time, your evenings, nights and weekends, as well as any spare moment of the day, doing anything like napping, going out to eat or playing an excitingly violent video game, don’t learn magic. In fact, dont start to learn it at all. It becomes an obsession. Sure, you can learn a few card tricks off of youtube videos or from your uncle whilst you sit on his lap (totally platonically, of course) but let me tell you, they will be shit. To learn the good stuff, to really throw yourself into the thick of it, you need to buy books. Not just any books, but the RIGHT books. Here is where your money starts to go. It takes hours of study to learn a trick, then maybe weeks of practice to actually be able to perform it smoothly. Sleights, tricks and routines, they roll into each other in your mind as you studiously work through Mark Wilson or Bob Longe, until the obsession grows even more. It has gotten to the point when I have to force myself to go to sleep at night, only to sit bolt upright at 3am to re-read a chapter in the RRTCM about vanishing aces and tricky shuffles.

Dont learn magic folks, because you will never, ever want to learn anything else. I take a pack of cards to my uni lectures, to work and wherever else I go. Obsession is a bad thing….

Peculiar

Peculiar is a term that has definitively lost its vogue in recent years, much the same as queer, which actually means pretty much the same thing but has been usurped by bigots to describe those of a different orientation to the majority.

But no, there is no real call for all things peculiar anymore, and why is that? If something is at all unusual to my piers now it is “mental” or “crazy” or “mad”. Why have the cerebrally challenged amongst us become the height of what is strange that we compare even the most trivial of abnormalities in daily life to them? A wheelie bin being blown over by a strong breeze is no more mental or crazy than the wind itself, which seeing as it is flying around blowing shit over is quite certainly of sound mind for a gust of wind. Now if the wind had come barrelling down the street and set fire to the wheelie bin before turning a cat inside out, that would without doubt be a wind that one could call crazy.

This brings me back to peculiar. Just now I was watching some television and I noticed an extraordinarily long hair growing from my arm. Not being a hairy person in general, this in itself is merit for the term peculiar. But what really dropped it into that P-word catagory was the fact that, when removed with a sharp tug, it occurred to me that this remarkable growth was actually longer than any of the hair on my head. Not only this but it was singular. What little arm hair I have was dwarfed by this Goliath of Keratin-based body parts. I would most certainly deem that peculiar, in fact it was the first word that sprung to mind. But had I not been blessed with a vocabulary of more than fourteen words, would I still have deduced that this hair was “mental”? No, I would not. Even without the words to describe this as anything other than mental or crazy or psychotic or manic depressive, I would not have believed that this hair being abnormally long would have any bearing on its state of mind. After all, it has no mind, its a fucking hair.
So remember good people, both of you that will ever actually read this (and one of those is probably me) that there is a multitude of words to describe something out of the ordinary. It would be nice to hear something other than the same five descriptive words once in a while.

Why the fuck would I want two blogs?

Ok, first thing is first. I signed up for a blog here and guess what. The first thing they offer me is ANOTHER Blog. What the fuck am I going to do with a second one when I haven’t even begun writing the first? Pointless internet shit gets my goat, and often gets in the way of the decent services sites like this can provide.

A friend of mine, Mr. Pokeh, and I were discussing the idiocy of Facebook aps. Who really utilises that service? I mean really? For that matter, who the fuck actually generates this inane electronic bullshit for the sole purpose of spamming it into my “Notifications” section in the hopes I will answer some cretinous, poorly spelled quiz to find out what flavor of gravel I am or what brick laying technique is most suited to my star sign. Do people really not have anything better to do? Do people not get laid anymore?

Now I understand the irony of me asking that, whilst ranting about things on the internet in my newly spawned internet blog, which of course nobody will ever read because it is clearly full of the same narcassistic and self indulgent fudge packets that the very people that created the “WICH GREAK GOD R U LOLZ?” quiz are probably writing about in their own pointless online journal. Of course, thats actually what this is, a glorified journal for a little girl to write her thoughts in on which boyband is the cutest and what colour pony is the best.

Dear Diary….

PS: Mr Pokeh is an avid backstreet boys fan, his blog even says so.